


supercut

by Pseudologia



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Blood, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Eventual Happy Ending, Fluff, M/M, i like to believe donna tartt would condone this if she believed in love, it's just a series of vignettes that eventually goes somewhere, mostly stuff from the book that I needed to see explored more or I was gonna die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-20 04:44:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20669540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pseudologia/pseuds/Pseudologia
Summary: You think you could chart the whole scarred expanse of him: dime-shaped black mark above his collar bone, birth mark. Neat circle at the crook of his left elbow, cigarette burn (his father’s). Neat circle at the top of his right calf, cigarette burn (his). Shiny-white gash inching its way from his stomach to the waistband of his underwear, appendix removal. (You’d had to call the ambulance.) There are new additions, but you’re so sure he would tell you everything about them if you asked that it already feels as though you know where he got those scars after all. He would offer you the story of his body like saying grace before supper.





	supercut

**Author's Note:**

> tfw you have other WIPs but you read all of the goldfinch way faster than you thought possible and then the movie happens and it's horrible but you're going insane anyway because love is inevitable. anyway. sorry
> 
> some things i know very little about: furniture, eastern european languages. and yet...
> 
> (if you hover over the ukranian/polish/russian, little translations should pop up. if you're on mobile, welp.)

You barely tolerate your dad on his own, but when he’s with Boris sometimes you hover at the edges of the room, eager to see what they’re like in each other’s orbits. You don’t like Boris’s ingratiating way with him; you do like your dad’s uncharacteristic patience, the way he absentmindedly offers Boris food and sips of beer mid-explanation.

“You see, the thing is you’re a Pisces,” your dad had told him one day while you did your history homework on the stairs, one ear perked up, an infantryman on the outskirts of enemy territory. “You’ve got a lot of stuff going on in there, and you’re not always sure what to do with it.”

Boris had hummed seriously, like a Zen monk rolling a fresh koan in between his teeth. “But everyone is a little bit like this, no?”

“Not necessarily,” your dad says. “Me, for example, I bottle it all up. Classic Scorpio—I’m not gonna let you in on what’s going on unless I really, really trust you. Xandra’s the opposite, a Capricorn. She might not tell you everything she’s got going on, but she’s going to have a lot of trouble keeping it hidden either way. And Theo—” you bury your head in your textbook like they’re looking at you, though you know of course they’re not, not from the next room “—Theo’s another case of still waters run deep. A Cancer. The three of us are all water signs, actually, which means we’re highly emotional—though we don’t necessarily want everyone to know that, of course. It’s a trade-off, you see: we’re more intuitive, but also more impulsive. We might be emotional, but we don’t like being vulnerable. We give of ourselves and then get angry with others for taking.”

You press down so hard with your highlighter that a little yellow aura seeps through to the next few pages. Whenever you see one of those errant neon marks in the weeks to come, it will cause an aching at the very center of you.

“This is interesting to hear,” Boris replies. “With Theo, I think I feel like I am never giving back enough.”

—

You never talk about the notes, but you’re sure he knows that you know. It’s a given about him, like the mole on the inside of his left wrist or the Polish curses he saves just for mornings spent with his head in the toilet bowl.

_Inflammable = flammable (????)_  
_ Window treatments шторы_  
_ Klepto_  
_ Maltese (dog kind - Popchyk)_  
_ “Emo” muzyka \- ask Theo what is  
Phosphorescence_

You collect them in a little pile in your left desk drawer. You know, in the smallest of ways, that you like the poetic simplicity of them, evidence of his mercurial monsoon way of blowing through your day. Maybe he’ll need them again, you tell yourself, though you know Boris has a mind like a zoetrope—he writes things down because it’s easier for him to remember the act of writing than it is to remember the words themselves. He never asks where any of the papers have gone.

A few months after the two of you first fool around, you find a balled-up liquor store receipt in the shower, the paper heavy-cotton-thin and wetly translucent:

_Spearmint peppermint wintergreen_  
_ Borough - burrow?  
Unrequited (любов)_

You take Xandra’s hair dryer to it on low, standing there patiently as the paper slowly grows opaque. You feel like an archaeologist on the cusp of a great discovery, though you’re not quite sure how to articulate its importance to yourself. Why spend your Saturday morning with this scrap of paper? If you can untangle the great, international mess of Boris’s vocabulary, can you also untangle him?

любов_—lyubov_—love. You close the browser window and scrub your history as soon as you read it, your pulse ticking in your neck to an uptempo beat. The note goes into your drawer, and you think about it every time you see him (and even when you don’t, though you rarely don’t) for the next two weeks. As you try to fall asleep, a clip show starts up in your head: all the times you’d caught him looking at you when he thought you were looking away, the tiny touches—a hand on your shoulder, your cheek, your arm—that you’d kept laughing off, the Polish with which he’s lulled you back to sleep. _Kochanie_, he calls you. Darling, darling, darling.

The whole confusing storm of it brews hot in your chest and you’re torn between anger—_Where _did he hear the term “unrequited love,” anyway?—and something softer around the edges. Later, you’ll find it written over and over again in your journals: _I wish I could stop thinking like a faggot_.

You think about saying something every day, but you never work up the courage. A few weeks after you find the note, he comes to your house after school and starts crowing about a girl in his Civics class.

—

You wake up one morning and there’s blood on your pillow—a shallow, sticky pool, nearly red-black and pink around the edges where it’s soaked into the fabric. You peel your cheek off of the white linen and a scarlet line of drool connects you to the bed. There’s a wet, metallic taste in your mouth and you spit lightly, a puff of air between your lips. A shotgun blast of red peppers the bed, and it makes you think of when Welty coughed and his blood was on your face; how guilty you’d felt when, later that night, you’d absentmindedly run the tap water and scrubbed the last of him from your skin. You glance furtively to the other side of the bed, but Boris lies there undisturbed, his black hair matted against the sheets and a pattern of squarish dents on his face from his studded bracelet. The divot your body left in the bedding arcs around his spine like a canyon around a river, cut clean through. You remember learning in third grade how the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon 6 million years ago—an impossibly long time to us, your teacher had said, Though, in the grand scheme of the universe, not such a long time at all.

Blood keeps filling your mouth, so you stumble without glasses on to the bathroom and spit into the sink. Red red red like the time when you were practically a baby and you ate too many cherry Jolly Ranchers and your vomit was vermillion; your mother had been nearly hysterical, but your father had convinced her not to take you to the emergency room and he’d been right. You try to remember last night—had Boris hit you? Had you knocked your head on the lip of the pool? The last thing you recall is a painful flash of nothing much: the alien-blue glow of the television and _The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari_ and Boris’s cannonball laugh, the living room light silver in his hair. Your mouth doesn’t even hurt, but there’s a strange tender softness above your left front tooth, and you spit again and there’s something solid to it, a bit of your gums twirling swirling down the drain. A little section of the roof of your mouth drips garishly onto your tongue and you spit out flesh again. It goes on like this for minutes, until finally the bleeding just stops.

You’ll bring it up to a dentist over a decade later, and they’ll tell you it was just a gum infection, remind you how lucky you were to keep your teeth after those years. You’ll nod. You won’t mention what you remember most about that morning: exiting the bathroom to see Boris turn over, bleary eyed, with a smearing of dried blood across his lips and chin.

—

On the morning of your flight home from Antwerp, you wake up and he’s standing next to his stove, eating pickled eggs from the jar. In just some ratty boxers and a pair of wool socks, he’s just as thin as you remember. You think you could chart the whole scarred expanse of him: dime-shaped black mark above his collar bone, birth mark. Neat circle at the crook of his left elbow, cigarette burn (his father’s). Neat circle at the top of his right calf, cigarette burn (his). Shiny-white gash inching its way from his stomach to the waistband of his underwear, appendix removal. (You’d had to call the ambulance.) There are new additions, but you’re so sure he would tell you everything about them if you asked that it already feels as though you know where he got those scars after all. He would offer you the story of his body like saying grace before supper.

But of course there are new marks on him that need no introduction: angry tiny craters in the bend of his right arm, purple-black and screaming.

“Good morning, Potter,” he says brightly. The circles under his eyes are dark (though when are they not?) and you wonder if he slept. “You sleep all right?”

“Yeah, thank you,” you tell him, oddly formal. You’d slept three hours. For you, clean, it’s a miracle.

“You need anything to eat before your flight?” he asks. He gestures with one of the eggs. You’re positive he doesn’t have any other food.

You politely decline and busy yourself with collecting your things, putting your patent leather dress shoes on and making sure your passport is in the pocket of your coat. When you’re ready, you park your shiny-clean carry-on by the door and look at him, still leaning amiably against the bare kitchen counter.

“You know, last night—” you start, flexing and balling up your left fist as you try to find words “—you asked me why you should stop shooting up.”

He nods.

“I guess I just wanted to make it clear that I think you should stop because if you don’t, you might die,” you say, and your words come out clipped and preachy and you worry you sound like an asshole. Still, you tell him, “And I don’t want you to die. Maybe you don’t care, but me, I really care if you’re still alive. Okay?”

He doesn’t answer so you add: “You don’t have to do this forever, you know.”

He scoffs. “And, what?”—palms up—“Can you see me working in office? Making copies? Nine to nine?”

You suppress the impulse to tell him_ it’s nine to five. _“You could come work for me,” you say instead. Echo of the past, reversed. “Come work for me.”

Boris looks right at you, like a word he can’t translate correctly. “You remember when we met again, in New York?”

“Yes.”

“I was so odd about going to your place, and you wanted only to show me Popchik. You remember?”

“Yes, of course.”

He shrugs. “I thought you were going to kill me. Thought you were taking me somewhere out of way to do it. I thought you were going to make me pay, for what I’d done to you with the painting.”

There’s a familiar, hollow ache at the center of your chest. “Boris—”

“What I am saying,” he tells you, “is I went anyway.”

He crosses the room and embraces you, one hand cupped around your neck. Your fingers clench against the skin of his back, sweat-slick and all too warm.

After a moment, he pulls away, pats you on the cheek. “Safe flight, Potter.”

—

The first time you go to a gay bar, you schlep all the way out to Brooklyn in a desperate attempt to avoid the shop’s gossipy regulars. You spend hours getting dressed beforehand, eventually settling on a black T-shirt you usually sleep in and the only pair of jeans you own. You wear penny loafers, because sometimes these things just can’t be helped.

The bar is on the smaller side, relatively clean and not too claustrophobic—you’ve come on a Tuesday night just to avoid the panic attack. Still, you’re surrounded by more gay men than you’ve ever met in your entire life. They’re tall, short, thin, fat, dark, fair, hairy, hairless, masculine, effeminate—wearing everything from overalls to fishnet knee-highs and platform shoes. Sometimes you kind of wish you lived in Omaha, or something. Somewhere where the bar for avant-garde wasn’t quite so high.

You order a seltzer with lime, because you’re on the wagon this week, and of course the first thing a guy at the bar says is that he likes your shoes. “So retro.” The second thing he does is ask what you’re drinking, and you tell him vodka soda to see if he’ll order it for you. He does.

He’s shorter than you, with wispy blonde hair and a muscular build. He’s not your type at all. He blows you in the bathroom and you come embarrassingly fast and he tells you it’s really no big deal at all—cute, actually. He asks for your number and you dial up the client-facing charm when you tell him you’re actually just visiting from out of town. You’ve only had three drinks, but when you get home you puke so hard you can't feel your feet.

—

You get a text from an unknown number at 3:23pm on a Thursday: **HELO POTR AM IN TOWN LETS HANG.**

You have him come over to your one-bedroom in Chinatown, even though you’re self-conscious about its size and the odd stain on one of the walls and the weirdly inescapable sound of clucking chickens from the south side. The point is: it’s yours. (Except for the sunniest windowsill and the extra pillows at the head of the bed, which are, decidedly, Popchyk’s.)

He enters it like it’s a holy temple, because of course he does—shoes off at the door, arms around you, how are you doing? There’s a brightness to him, a hardier fullness to his face and a bit more color to his skin.

He holds your face in both his hands and says, “Your own place, Potter. A decade ago, would either of us have believed it?” 

You’re overcome by his handsomeness, eyes locked in the entryway/kitchen/living room like that. The sharpness of his jaw and and fullness of his mouth and sincerity of his gaze. You try not to think about the delivery guy you’d jacked off in here just two nights before.

You sit down on the antique leather sofa that takes up most of your common space and Boris eyes you warily, fingers tapping an anxious pattern against his thigh.

“Anywhere you want to go?” he asks, but you shrug.

“I’m not really looking to recreate our wilder nights right now,” you say diplomatically.

He raises his eyebrows. “You are clean?”

A wave of your hand. “Ish. No more pills. Fewer drinks. Slippery slope.”

“How long?”

“About four months since my last oxy,” you say, and you’re almost surprised by the truth of it. Four months and nine days.

“And you’re sleeping?”

You laugh. “That’s a generous term for it." But yeah, mostly. You can fall asleep on your own, now, even if it’s still hard to stay asleep. “Better than before, anyway.”

“Well I am so proud of you, Potter,” he tells you, and he looks it—eyes shining, grin wide. He places a hand over his heart. “I have actually been cutting back on crazy shit myself.”

You’re slightly ashamed by your incredulity, but you still say, “_No_.”

“Deadly serious.” He rolls up the sleeve of his rumpled, button-down shirt. “Nothing new for almost a half-year.”

It’s been eight months since Antwerp, but you can tell he’s being honest with you. The angry purple on his arm has faded to a scar-light pink. You hold his right wrist and angle his arm to better see, like you’re worried a different ray of the early-evening light will reveal it all to be an optical illusion.

“Wow,” you finally breathe, looking up at him. “Congratulations, Boris.”

He rolls his eyes. “_Spasibo_. You don’t have to be so shocked.”

You have to laugh. “We once snorted aspirin together because we wanted to see if it would do anything and Xandra had hidden the vikes,” you say. “Yes, I do.”

“I always tell you I can stop any time.”

“And is that what happened?" you ask drily. "You just s_topped _heroin?”

The line of his mouth goes flat. “No, Potter. I shit myself for four days. Is that what you are wanting to hear?”

That sharp, honking laugh of his mirrors your own. Just like that it’s, as Boris would say, back to old times—the two of you talking shit and making each other laugh harder than anybody else you’ve ever known.

You uncap a few beers and Boris breaks out some shitty weed, and after an hour or so you’re on the floor, huddled shoulder to shoulder against the couch, two roaches in a crystal ashtray by your feet and a small army of amber bottles on coasters dotting the hardwood. Popchik snores audibly in Boris’s lap, tiny paws twitching. You gesture emphatically as you talk about your last trip to Christie’s, how you’d nearly let some batty old bitch take an underpriced armoire right out from under your nose. Boris asks after Hobie and you say that he’s good, he’s Hobie—not a single thing has changed about his life in the past almost-year.

“And your redhead?” Boris asks, leaning his head against the couch and tilting his face to look at you. He raises his eyebrows suggestively. “How is she?”

“Ah—” you start, half pathetic attempt at a laugh and half contemplation “—she’s not mine, for one.”

His eyebrows crash together: concern, confusion. “Potter, no! What happened?”

“Well,” you take your glasses off with one hand, rub at both eyes with your other. “Actually, I—okay. I hope this doesn’t make things uncomfortable for you, although I totally respect if that’s how you feel, but—” _Ugh_, you think. Your head hurts. “—okay, well. I’ve been sleeping with men.”

You force yourself to look at him. His lips are turned down, eyebrows up, like, _Huh! _

“I did not know if you would ever, what is term, have the balls.” He take a nonchalant sip of beer, gestures with the bottle. “But apparently you do, Potter. Literally.” He overenunciates: _lit-er-a-lee. _

Annoyance blooms black and bright in the pit of your gut. “Sure, okay, you were right about me,” you snap. “I’m a fucking _pidor_ and I always have been. Top marks.”

He scowls. “Don’t call yourself that.”

“Why not?”

“Because is an ugly word. Kind of word they use to kill people where I come from.” He rolls his bottle between his hands. “In Russia, someone calls you _pidor_, you fucking run. Trust me.”

“Okay,” you say. “Sorry,” though you’re not quite sure what you’re apologizing for.

Up, down, up, the bottle travels between his hands. A bead of liquid still clinging to the inside draws a veined pattern along the glass.

“So how is it?”

You swallow, suddenly overcome by dry mouth though you’ve barely smoked. “What?”

Slavic shrug. “The men.”

“Uh.” You grasp for words. “Sort of...impersonal?”

“Hmm. Does it feel real, though?”

You frown. A mistranslation, maybe? “I’m not sure I quite know what you mean.”

He sinks further back against the couch, his feet nearly brushing the feet of your mid-century bookshelf. “My whole life—bad checks, fake jewelry, women I don’t want, or who don’t want me, my own teeth—feels like everything I touch is fake,” he says. Looking at you sideways. “Sometimes I wonder if you are the only real thing.”

You breathe a bit more shallowly, a sudden heady, dizzy high dripping over you like a cracked egg.

“No,” you say. “It doesn’t feel real, not in that way.”

The way he is looking at you could make you do anything. You know because it already has. You’ve stolen and lied and killed and loved and touched and cooked and cleaned, all for the way his near-black eyes meet yours with no pretense. _Do you want to know a secret? I'm running away, will you come? Do you want to try something fun? _ Every time since always you’ve answered, _Yes, yes, yes. _

He asks you, “Do you ever think of me, when you are with other men?”

And it’s impossible for you to say anything else besides the truth, which is, “Every time.”

He leans forward and kisses you, one hand on your chest, and suddenly you’re fifteen again, a head shorter than him and completely caught off-guard, heart in your throat and hands stiff at your sides.

He starts to pull away and you realize that waiting another decade for this would be like waiting another decade for oxygen or sunlight or rain. You take his face in your hands, just as he had not two hours ago, and you pull him to you. He hums, a short, soft little noise from his nose, and opens his mouth to yours, and you’re going to remember this tomorrow, you realize as his tongue brushes yours, you’re going to remember all of it. And it’s nothing like the blackout, shameful tumbles you’d taken as kids or the prim, furtive sex you’ve motioned through with women—you’re just kissing, but it’s probably the most erotic moment of your life to date.

Boris tries to shift closer and Popchik yelps irksomely, peeved to have been woken up. Boris squeezes your arm and laughs, depositing Popchik onto the couch cushions above you with a _Przepraszam, Snaps_. He looks back at you, color high in his pale face, chest rising and falling as he takes deep breaths through his nose.

You have a thought, sudden and sobering. “If we keep doing this,” you say, “later on, are you going to just tell me it was something else?”

He shakes his head. Softly: “_Nyet _.”

“Then why did you, before?”

He scrubs a hand over his face. “I thought it was easier this way. I think maybe I was also trying to convince myself of something that was not true. My father always so concerned with image growing up—have right watch, right job, nobody can touch you.” He looks up at the ceiling. “I think, on some levels, around age sixteen I just get tired of having the shit beaten out of me. I think, okay, this is what I am supposed to be? I can get girlfriend, sell drugs, get wife, and everybody leave me alone? But then, with painting following me everywhere I go, I can’t—I never stop thinking of you. Not one day in eight years.” He looks back at you again. “And then I see you again, and everything is coming back—how I missed you, how I felt as kid, how I feel now knowing you hate me for the painting and will soon show me just how much—and it is easier—I am sorry, but it is easier, in that moment, to hurt you. Pretend your problem, not mine.”

“Kind of like with the drinking, or the drugs.”

He laughs. “Right. You are blackout, but I have all under control.” With a shake of his head—“I never had things under control.”

You smile sadly. “Me either.”

“Still don’t, I don’t think.”

“Me either.”

He grins, arms spread wide. “Then how do you explain own apartment in greatest city in the world, Potter?”

You laugh. You take your glasses off and try, futilely, to clean them on the hem of your shirt. “Right, well. I think if I really knew what I was doing, I would have never let you stop kissing me.” And you mean to say it about right now but you’re probably also saying it about ten years ago, too.

But he doesn’t lean in again, just keeps looking at you. That same, searching gaze that’s traveled thousands of miles to be right next to you today. The moment stretches on and on, and it starts to make you nervous—you’re wondering when he’s going to leave again, and for how long, and where he’ll go. Who he’ll return to.

“When you leave,” you say, “are you going to go back to your wife?”

Boris shakes his head. “I never had a wife.”

“Your girlfriend, then.”

“I don’t have girlfriends, either. Not in that way.”

You throw an arm over your eyes. You laugh, long and embarrassingly loud, like you haven’t in a very, very long time—relief pressing the air from your lungs in a one-two rhythm.

“Oh my God,” you finally say, wiping tears from your eyes, “I’m such an idiot. You’re_ such _a fucking idiot. We’re both _morons_.”

He’s hysterical, too. “Yah. _Takiye idioty_.”

“You know, when we were kids and I left that night, all I wanted to do was say ‘I love you.’ But I didn’t know how.” You’re trying to add to the levity, there’s some joke in here that you want to root out, though the words themselves are so somber. “And, in the end, I figured it didn’t matter, because you already knew.”

Boris understands exactly what you’re trying to say. He busts out laughing once again. “Why should you think I already know this?!”

You’re back in hysterics, too, hiccuping and gasping between words. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“I had no fucking idea, you _dupek_. I thought you were so freaked out, I kiss you and you are like—” he goes stiff as a board, arms straight out and shoulders tense, like someone being electrocuted.

You wipe at your eyes again; the tears keep stinging. “Jesus, it’s a miracle that we ever ended up talking about this. We could’ve been octogenarians. Making retirement home confessions.”

He takes your free hand in both of his own, smiling but once again sincere. “We have never been ones to turn down miracles, have we?” he asks, and he pulls you back toward him again, one hand warm at the back of your neck, and you’re kissing again and it feels like nothing else ever has. His hand in your hair, your thumb over his jaw, your fist in his shirt. It feels like the first time you ever did coke, Xanax, oxy, before the numbness set in that kept you coming back. It feels like an inevitable collision, like chaos and calm.

It feels like, if you could have this before you go to bed every night, you might finally be able to sleep.

—

You grow up together again.

Boris stays, sublets a place not too far from the shop, and you drag him around the block to movies at Film Forum every week. The way the silvery light from the black-and-white reprints shines in his hair never, ever gets old.

He’s stubborn about work, at first, insistent that his leftover money from Polish Cleaning Service is enough to last him for years, but he comes by the shop so much to visit you anyway, “just hanging around” for longer and longer stretches until he is, in essence, your employee. When you press the first check into his palm—_You spent all last week balancing the books, Boris, just take it_—he leers up at you and makes a joke about workplace sexual harassment. A little while later, an old regular almost catches you making out behind an American Empire Style credenza.

Eventually he moves in with you in Chinatown, filling the fire escape with plants you can’t name and ashtrays full to bursting. He smokes like a chimney and carries Popchik under one arm everywhere he goes, insisting that he’s much too old to walk. He still has the same preferred side of the bed (left) and ratty old boots; you still have the same weird ticklish spots (right hip, left knee) and a squeaky-clean shoe rack in your closet. You fight when he leaves bare glasses of water on the furniture and you get snippy with him one week when you have the flu. He finally learns how to cook: borscht, pickled everything, tuna salad, some lentil-coconut milk thing he pilfers from The New York Times Cooking website and just calls “Island Surprise.”

You try therapy, but you don’t have health insurance (you maybe never will) and you can’t find anybody who talks to you in a way that doesn’t make you feel like they’ve got one hand on a red button, Press for Emergency Basket Case Management, whenever you speak. You try reading, instead: self-esteem, codependency, sobriety. Your doctor prescribes you a low-dose, non-habit-forming anti-anxiety medication. You go to your first NA meeting without telling Boris, because you’re terrified he’ll laugh. A month in, you finally confess, and he bops you on the side of the head and accompanies you to your next meeting. You try not to make eye contact during the Serenity Prayer, because you know you’ll both bust out laughing if you do. _Higher Power, Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change… _

And maybe you’ll never change that. You don’t know that either of you will ever stop drinking, or smoking, or doing nightclub bumps because if you didn’t buy it then it doesn’t really count. But every time you sit down at a meeting it feels like you’re waking up for the first time all day, coming to and shocked to find yourself sitting in a plasticky church chair. You go more than Boris does, but he asks you about it often over home-cooked dinner or while walking Popchik, like he wants to live through you vicariously.

Here is the most important thing: You don’t constantly worry that the two of you are going to die anymore. After a year of falling asleep in the same bed, you stop waking up with a jolt to make sure he’s still there. You ride the subway again, sometimes even during rush hour; you go to an exhibit at the Met; you eat at Italian restaurants in the East Village, his hand at the back of your neck through it all. When you get nightmares, he still pulls you close, half-awake, without a second thought. When you fight and he eyes you warily, like he’s waiting for you to just finally hit him or kill him or leave, you lower your voice. You stay where you are. You both do.

Finally, you say ‘I love you’ to each other, over and over again until it’s comfort-worn and familiar like genuine scuffing on an old cherry finish. It’s no longer a monumental proclamation, it’s the thing you say between bites of breakfast cereal, or as you put on mohair gloves by the door, or before you turn off his bedside lamp, using the stretch as an excuse to kiss him. It’s the kind of thing he texts you in emoji-laden messages, says to you in a sing-song voice while using Popchyk as a puppet, whispers to you while dawn breaks outside your window. You never thought you would be a person in love, but here you are.

And sometimes it slips up your chest and into your throat until it feels like it’s going to choke you. Sometimes you almost run. Sometimes you don’t know if the fight is worth it. You cry, more than once, when you think about the fact that your mother is never going to meet him, and you still worry all the time—when will it end? What about when Popchik dies? When Hobie dies? If the police ever knock down your door? You don’t know.

“This is sort of the point of life, yes?” he tells you, when you finally voice these things to him one night in front of the television. “The not knowing?”

He’s on the floor, back against the couch, and you’re sitting with your back against his chest, legs tangled in front of you like kids on a sled. His arms are wrapped around your middle, chin hooked over your shoulder.

You turn a little, rest your nose against the side of his head. “Is it?”

“Well,”—he shrugs, you can feel it—“I spent all those years never knowing if I would see you again, never knowing what might happen if I did. And if I’d made up my mind, decided I knew there was no chance for you to ever welcome me back to your life again, would I have come back? Found you, brought you to Amsterdam? No. Then where would we be?”

You hum. “Not here.”

Though silently you wonder if maybe, no matter what you’d done or who you’d been or where you’d gone, you were always going to end up sitting in this exact spot with this exact person.

Boris nods, squeezes you gently. His voice is moonlight-soft when he tells you, “You might not be exactly where you are supposed to be.”

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr [@donnatarttsbitch](http://donnatarttsbitch.tumblr.com) if you wanna say hey.


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